If you ask the XRP community who they trust most within the crypto space, a lot will tell you the name of David Schwartz. If you ask people where the most bizarre notions about Ripple come from, you’ll likely hear the same response. Schwartz is in a very peculiar position. He’s the voice with the most credibility from Ripple and the person whose every tweet, photo, and profile picture are dissected for any hidden meaning.
The answer is that Schwartz responds to rumours rather than sweeping them under the carpet, since long before his followers heard of XRP, he’s already been posting under the name JoelKatz. The habit is one of the reasons for the sheer amount of rumours about him. He responds, the answer is cut off and misconstrued and a new round of speculation begins on whatever he says next. Let’s take a look at the theories that crop up around David Schwartz, Ripple, and XRP, what Schwartz has actually said about them, and how much of it is accurate.
Who David Schwartz actually is, before the rumors start
Prior to becoming Ripple’s CTO, Schwartz was a cryptographer and distributed-systems engineer who worked on contracts on behalf of the National Security Agency, developing encrypted messaging and cloud storage years before anyone had heard of Bitcoin. He’s been forthright about how limited that work has been, and that he never had access to anything approaching high-level intelligence and had to certify projects to meet requirements without seeing many of them himself. That is important because later, it’s one of the threads people will keep pulling on when they want to put him in the creation of Bitcoin.
Schwartz says that he didn’t discover Bitcoin until 2011, two years after its inception. Shortly after that, he joined Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto to create the XRP Ledger, an open, decentralized network built on various consensus mechanisms, including a model other than proof-of-work like Bitcoin’s. This breakdown of the functioning of blockchain technology is a good place to start if you’re looking for an extensive technical overview of how these types of systems work. The ledger was created in 2012, and Schwartz rose to the rank of Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer in 2018, a position he held for seven years.
That is no longer the case, however, when Schwartz announced on X in September 2025 that he would be stepping away from his current CTO role towards day-to-day duties at the end of this year to spend more time with his family, and that he would be transitioning into the role of CTO Emeritus at Ripple, joining the Board of Directors at the invitation of Chairman Chris Larsen. Ripple’s VP of engineering, Dennis Jarosch, was appointed to run the technical aspect of the day-to-day. As one would expect, the news of the announcement sparked speculation as to what it actually meant for XRP. Nearly a year later, the bottom line is somewhat uninspiring: Schwartz is still amongst one of the most active individuals in the entire XRP community, still runs his own validator node, and still posts more frequently than most full-time crypto commentators.
The Satoshi Nakamoto theory that won’t go away
This is the behemoth of all David Schwartz rumors, it’s been around in some form or another since at least 2019, when a tweet from the late John McAfee claimed that David Schwartz created Bitcoin before it was promptly removed. The theory gained momentum again during the year of 2020, when XRP owners explored his background in cryptography and his first time working on Bitcoin, and it re-emerged again in 2022 when the theory was thrown out in the open by an early Ripple employee named Bob Way.
What made 2024 an even more difficult year to get through was the fact that some parts of the community took a bunch of quotes out of context from a podcast interview that Brad Garlinghouse gave and made it seem like he was basically saying that the early engineers of Ripple were deep technical Bitcoin folks, which was a little inaccurate. In parallel, an HBO documentary about the history of Bitcoin brought the issue of its origins back into the spotlight, putting Schwartz’s name back on the agenda as it always does when people get interested in the subject.
The answer that Schwartz has given has remained the same. He didn’t discover Bitcoin until 2011, after Satoshi’s last public correspondence, and he stated that he believes that it’s more likely that Satoshi is referring to a group of people rather than just a single person. He’s also poked fun at himself in that regard from time to time: In 2024, he took a photo with an anonymous masked man and declared it to be absolute proof he’s not Satoshi. In 2025, when a lawyer slammed the door on the Department of Homeland Security, asking if the government had files on Bitcoin’s early days, Schwartz returned to his days working for the NSA and stated that a U.S. intelligence origin story for Bitcoin isn’t a terrible theory, but still denied any personal involvement in the project.
No public record actually has him in the midst of Bitcoin’s creation. He ticks enough boxes in the cryptography résumé, the semi-government-related work history, and the building of an alternative ledger to make this theory unlikely to die.
The Secret government plan for XRP
This one has been rumored in XRP circles: the notion that Ripple has a backdoor deal with the U.S. government or with central banks to be the backbone of some eventual new international settlement system, but for now the deal is kept under a non-disclosure agreement.
In April 2026, Schwartz addressed it head-on on X, saying that those who think most of these theories are a sham are deluding themselves. He admitted that there’s some truth there: Ripple does sign real NDAs with real partners that’s the normal enterprise fintech thing to do. What he was against was going from a confidential partnership to a hidden global rollout. His point was that if Ripple (or anyone) had such an idea in the back of their mind, capital would already be pricing for it and not waiting for a bombshell announcement.
One reason for the longevity of this theory is the fact that it has a timing component to it. Donald Trump stated in early 2025 that once he was elected, he would create a U.S. crypto reserve, and initially XRP was included along with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano. In actuality, only Bitcoin became the strategic reserve asset, while other assets were diverted into a different reserve, but the initial press release was sufficient to fuel old speculation by the central banks. That’s on top of a handful of Ripple board members who separately commented that they previously had a number of conversations, mostly around CBDC pilots, and not XRP adoption specifically, and that remark is repeated all the time as proof of something bigger. Schwartz has never had an answer to offer: Confidentiality is not confirmation, and most leaks are nothing more than a confidentiality-approved guess.
Why he keeps shooting down the $10,000 XRP rumors
After reading any discussions in XRP forums, you will encounter price targets: $50, $100, $1,000, $10,000, and so on, which move according to valuation formulas, outputs from AI chatbots, or simply on the basis of a feeling. Schwartz has become somewhat of a designated skeptic on this issue, which has made him something of a pariah to a sizeable portion of his own community.
He’s been consistent and, in all honesty, pretty basic economic logic. If we’re talking sophisticated, well-capitalized investors with any realistic potential of a $10,000 price pull, they would certainly be pushing the button now, and the price would be pushed up by them. When he was asked to comment on a prediction that came from him and others through AI, which set an $8-$15 valuation range on XRP, he provided the same response: Markets are not perfectly efficient, and they aren’t so broken that a real 10% chance of a 100x is not priced for years on end.
He’s certainly not beyond admitting he has been wrong on size before. When a user raised concerns about $50 to $100 being too high, Schwartz responded that he had been thinking $0.25 was an improbable top for XRP, but that it’s gone way beyond that. That same unpredictability cuts in both directions, though. Similarly, during 2026 XRP has also been subjected to real correction risk on multiple occasions, hence the constant focus back on what current prices really mean about the market’s faith, not what it would like to see in the future. There’s a difference between recognizing surprise in the past and approving of the next moonshot number, and he’s done his best not to cross that line, especially among the more bullish corners of the XRP Army.
The Gag Order Accusation
In May 2026, another more specific rumor emerged: Schwartz has signed some sort of contract that stipulates he can’t reveal the truth to the community regarding Ripple or XRP after he leaves. It appeared after a member of the community commented that his newfound conservatism since he took the helm as CTO may be a sign of a muzzle, not an opinion.
Schwartz, who has never been seen to be lying to the community under any deal that he has signed, slammed it down as if it had hit him in the face. The exchange also pulled up old posts from 2017 about XRP liquidity and transaction sizing that some had misinterpreted over the years to mean there was a promise in the future price. The post was not a target, but rather about market mechanics, Schwartz said, and he had thought about deleting it many times but had decided it was better to let the old context stand because removing it creates more confusion than it clarifies.
Scammers wearing his face
Unlike all of the above, this isn’t really a rumour about Schwartz. It is a warning from him, and it is the warning that every XRP holder should take seriously. Schwartz directly alerted in May 2026 about an escalation of fake airdrop and giveaway scams on XRP Ledger. He said that the accounts impersonating him on most platforms other than X, including Instagram and Telegram, are almost certainly scams.
The mechanics are no different from what anyone who has seen the crypto scam landscape change would be familiar with: fake profiles that promise to double any XRP sent their way, AI-generated deepfake videos of Ripple executives pitching bogus investment programs, and NFTs being dropped into wallets that have embedded approval requests that can wipe out a wallet as soon as they are signed. The XRPL Foundation echoed Schwartz’s fears, stating that the volume of scams had surged and that at least one of the community members had had a hard time losing approximately €400,000 to a scam impersonator that had been operating a long-term fake mentorship scheme.
As the scams become more sophisticated, the takeaway is not: As the scams get trickier, it is not: Ripple never held a giveaway, never has any official Telegram presence, and will not ask anyone to send crypto before it gives anything back. When in doubt if a David Schwartz giveaway or a too good to be true offer is real or phony, it only takes a few seconds to use a wallet address scanner before depositing anything into their wallet and it can prevent you from becoming the latest statistic. It’s also important to understand how a seed phrase works and why any reputable support account, executive, or giveaway will not ever ask for your seed phrase, as that’s exactly what most of these scams are looking for.
The ETHGate theory
In mid-2026, another rumour started to circulate on social media, dubbed ETHGate, suggesting that the SEC had deliberately been more lenient towards Ethereum than it had been with Ripple and that this was part of a wider strategy to maintain a status quo favourable for banks. Asked directly about it in July 2026, Schwartz gave a notably measured response for someone who lived through the entire Ripple lawsuit. He noted that he didn’t have a lot of evidence for there being some sort of coordinated effort, but said that it seemed it was more likely due to competition among rival crypto projects.
It didn’t matter, though, when another former SEC official made a separate claim on the same issue in the same month, that the SEC’s case was against Ripple’s method of selling XRP, not the XRP itself. That, Schwartz said, is a rewrite of history, as the SEC’s initial complaint and public statements had repeatedly invoked a security that it was ultimately claiming was a security in the 2023 court decision. He also disclosed that his own attorneys had informed him early on that Ripple’s situation was unsalvageable and that it should settle. Ripple continued to battle the case, reportedly spending about $150 million on legal fees until the case was settled in 2025.
The Smaller Myths Worth Clearing Up
There are a few smaller speculations to complete the picture, but almost all of them fall apart on closer inspection, of the kind required by roughly 30 seconds.
One of them is his net worth. Do a bit of research, and you’ll come up with all sorts of numbers: some are in the hundreds of millions, others are in the billions, and most of them have little or no actual source behind them, are from poor-quality sites, and contradict each other! Schwartz has never disclosed a precise number. In his own words on X, he has confirmed that he used to hold some 26 million XRP, over 1,000 Bitcoin, and over 40,000 Ethereum, which he sold at prices of around $1.05 per ETH, a large amount of the Bitcoin valued at $750 to $1,000, and most of the XRP starting around ten cents. In hindsight, buying early in his career to add more XRP to the mix probably a big mistake, he says. He’s stated that despite this early exit, he still makes a lot more money from XRP than any other cryptocurrency.
One of these comes from the fact that Ryan Fugger was the creator of an early payment idea (pre-Bitcoin) called RipplePay around the year 2004, which is where XRP may have originated. It was a trust-based settlement network that never even had a native token, said Schwartz, who added that the XRP Ledger’s code was written from scratch by him, McCaleb, and Britto, and that they were the only ones who knew the code for the Ripple name from the earlier project. A related theory tries to tie a 1988 distributed-computing patent to the origins of blockchain technology itself. Schwartz has dismissed any real connection between that old patent and XRP’s design.
The other lie is that Schwartz isn’t even certain about the future of XRP when he says so in public, but he does say it anyway, as if he’s a boring guy who’s not into the hype. He has spurned this outright, citing years of steady public criticism his own and plenty of others about his overly cautious sales tactics, and that what he says in public and in private are in sync. Particularly amusing is that, nearly a year after specifically dismissing the myth of the Fuzzybear image, in May 2026, when Schwartz updated his X profile with an image of the Fuzzybear tied to old 2013-era XRP forum lore, another part of the community used the image of the avatar as a coded signal.
Why the Rumors keep finding him specifically
Some of this comes down to simple math. Schwartz posts regularly, directly interacts with his critics, and seldom deletes anything that is posted, providing his community of many thousands of active buyers and sellers with vast quantities of material to sift through. Some of it is his history: being a cryptographer with a history of being close to government, and helping create a competitor to Bitcoin was always going to raise what does he really know questions. And some of it is structural friction. Schwartz is very risk-averse and bases the price on sound, rational, market-based considerations, whereas there’s a large portion of the XRP community that wants things to be otherwise, emotionally and economically. Rumours are loose byproducts of those two attitudes when they meet in the real world, on X, in real time.
This is not a bashing of the XRP community as a whole. Over a long period of time, people are forced to learn how to read tea leaves when the only thing available to them is tea leaves for years during a multi-year SEC lawsuit. Old patterns tend to continue even when it is realized that there was something uncertain.
How to Differentiate Between Real and Fake Statements
Since so much of this rumour doom and gloom has now become a part of the scam, it’s worth being specific about verification. Schwartz is the only one whom he has backed on X, @JoelKatz. He has made it clear that any version of him on Instagram, Telegram, or other platforms is likely to be fake. Ripple’s official communications are made via verified accounts or through the official website and not through DMs, Telegram, or those so-called customer service chats that contact you first. Schwartz won’t ask anyone to ship crypto for more crypto, and no legitimate figure in this space would ever say that they need to be urgent or secret about a game-changing Ripple or XRP update.
The common denominator of all rumors on this list is the last part, be it Satoshi speculation or a secret government deal or a fake giveaway. The fastest version of a story is generally the one that goes without verification and has excitement. Schwartz isn’t nearly as dramatic as the rumors make him, but patient, sometimes a little blunt, and always willing to meet you in the flesh at no cost, if you ask him face-to-face in X. It’s also proven to be much more durable thus far.
